User account menu

Copying NetBeans GUI components in KDE and Plasma 5

Submitted by gunnar
on Fri, 05/06/2016 - 09:21

For some time now, it has not been possible to copy GUI components in the NetBeans GUI editor. Apparently, the KDE clipboard doesn't play well with NetBeans GUI copying. Until Plasma 5 arrived, the clipboard tray icon was provided by klipper and you could get GUI copying to work by just selecting Quit from the tray icon popup menu. Klipper was even nice enough to ask if you want it to start again automatically at next login. Of course, you didn't need to log out and log in again, you just called up krunner with Alt+F2 and typed klipper.

With Plasma 5 it is not so easy. The clipboard tray icon is now provided by a plasmoid residing in

/usr/share/plasma/plasmoids/org.kde.plasma.clipboard

This plasmoid doesn't have a Quit command. Instead, you have to get rid of it by removing the above directory, or as I prefer, move it out of Plasma's reach. That way, you can move it back if you need it for some reason. Since you need to be root to do this, you can move it into the root home directory:

Open a Konsole window and become root.

Go to the plasmoids directory:

cd /usr/share/plasma/plasmoids

Move away the clipboard plasmoid:

mv org.kde.plasma.clipboard/ /root/

Stop the Plasma Shell:

killall plasmashell

Quit the Konsole and start the Plasma Shell again with krunner:

Alt+F2 plasmashell

The clipboard plasmoid is now gone but it will probably return when you install a plasma update. If that happens you have to do the above steps again.

You are now free to use klipper instead, when you are not in the process of copying GUI components.

There is an open (at the time of writing) bug filed for NetBeans, concerning this problem: